When the Department of Justice report on the Albuquerque Police Department came out last year, it highlighted that interactions between officers and people with mental illnesses can be volatile. It also pointed to limited services. But what about the mental wellbeing of the officers?

On March 19, 2012, the call that came in to Albuquerque police was not an emergency.

“Yeah, I want to report a suspicious person,” the caller said. “I was walking out to go to school. There’s a guy sitting in a black Mitsubishi Montero. And he asked me if I knew anybody that wanted to buy a car system.”

Officer Martin Smith responded and within moments, shot and killed the man in the Mitsubishi SUV.

Here’s how Smith first told the story: He pulled-up behind the black SUV, got out, approached the vehicle alone and began issuing orders for the driver to stick his hands out the window. Thirty-one-year-old Daniel Tillison backed up, hitting the police car. Smith shot a rear tire. Then he spotted a black object in one of Tillison’s hands, and shot him through the window. “Adam 335 PD! Shots fired. Subject tried running me over,” Smith yelled to dispatch.

The object turned out to be a cell phone. He explained what happened next during an interview with detectives after the incident.

“At that point, he didn’t appear like he was breathing or anything. He was just [breath sounds],” he said. “So I opened the door, pulled him out of the vehicle, laid him down on the ground. Ran to the back of my car, because I got combat field dressings.”

Officer Smith is a veteran of the military who served in Afghanistan. The other people in the room check in with him, saying: “You OK? Good job. It’s over. Take a deep breath.”

But the sticking point for Tillison’s family is how Smith described the look Tillison gave him:

“He was looking at me the whole time. And he was like, I don’t want to say, like, the warrior stare. Or I’m-going-to-hurt-you type stare.”

Daniel Tillison’s children help set up a memorial for him in the place where he died. —Photo courtesy of Mary Jobe

Mary Jobe is the mother of Tillison’s three children. “What officer is going to tell another officer that somebody gave them the warrior stare unless they were in PTSD mode?” she asked. “What is a warrior stare? How can you feel threatened by the way somebody looks at you?”

Jobe was with Tillison for 10 years. In that time, she said he had a heroin addiction and went into methadone treatment. But she maintained he never brought his problems home with him. And when he was straight, she remembered, he was a caring and energetic dad.

“Daniel sadly lost his life because of the officer and the mental status he had at the moment he had shot and killed Daniel,” she said. “So, my kids are now without a father because of the city’s irresponsibility and negligence in hiring this officer.”

That’s the thrust of a lawsuit filed last year on behalf of Jobe and her kids.

Frances Carpenter is Jobe’s lawyer. “I think officers do have a really hard job out there,” she said. “No one can disagree with that.”

Carpenter alleges that Smith was diagnosed with PTSD by the VA Hospital, and that APD knew about it. Proof of that diagnosis hasn’t been presented yet, and a judge will rule on that issue and others in the coming months.

According to state regulation, police are required to undergo a mental health evaluation when they’re hired. But some officers take a leave of absence to serve in the military.

—Photo courtesy of Mary Jobe

“When they come back, are they subject to a second mental health examination? No they’re not. Why aren’t they?” Carpenter asked.

APD explained in an email that those kinds of evaluations could be considered discriminatory under federal law. APD policy does require mental health check-ins and critical incident debriefings after traumatic events on the job.

Still, Carpenter said the department isn’t adequately screening officers or providing enough psychological care. “I think a lot of times these officers are themselves victims,” she said. “They’re victims of their employers. They’re victims of a system that doesn’t allow them to be people just like us.”

Lt. Glenn St. Onge with APD’s crisis intervention team said police are encouraged to report the misconduct of their colleagues. He appeared on the KUNM “Call-In Show” in November.

“If it’s, you know, an issue of they’re worried about the officer, the officer is having a tough time maybe it’s something at home—there’s nothing punitive for an officer to make a referral,” he said.

Substance abuse treatment is not available for everyone who needs it in New Mexico, and this shortage is at the root of some tragic altercations with police.

Mike Gomez met me in a park in Albuquerque, holding a framed photo of his son Alan. “He was a good kid, a normal kid,” he said. “He graduated high school on time. He was a Little League All-Star.”

Mike has been speaking out about the Albuquerque Police Department since his son was killed by APD in 2011. But there hasn’t been a lot of coverage of what his son was like, he told me. “Around mid school he started having some emotional problems,” Mike said. “I wish I would have known it then. I guess he started drinking when he was about in the eighth grade or seventh grade. He was still a happy kid. He rode skateboards and stuff. He was fearless. Alan was fearless.”

By age 22, Alan was already a union sheet metal worker like his dad, and he owned his own home. But, Mike said, his son was struggling with a heroin addiction. “I was leaving town. I told him to go to his brother’s house so he wouldn’t be alone,” he said. “And he did. I was proud of him. He was trying to get better, get straight again.”

Mike said Alan tried some new drugs the night he was killed. A toxicology report found heroin and meth in his system, according to the District Attorney’s Office. “His brother seen the whole thing,” Gomez said. “And his brother right to this day is still mentally just devastated. It’s just eating on his soul. When one person’s gone in the family, it not only leaves a hole in the whole heart of the family, but it devastates the mind of the families, the way they act, their whole being you know?”

Alan’s brother’s girlfriend called 911 that night. She told the dispatcher that Alan was acting crazy, was going in and out of the house, that he had a gun and wouldn’t let them move.

“Albuquerque Police Department, come out now!” an officer shouted. “We can’t go away sir. You need to come out now!” In the police lapel camera footage, the gunshot is abrupt. Officers rushed into the house. Alan was shot in the torso and lay bleeding on the floor. You can hear the anguished cries of his brother in the background. “Where’s the gun? Did anybody find the gun? Ask them where the gun was!” an officer called.

Police didn’t find a gun on or near Alan but rather in the hall closet.

In an interview with detectives, the shooter, Officer Sean Wallace, explained that he’d been on his way home after a shift when he heard about the situation on a police scanner. He turned his car around and headed to the scene. Wallace described seeing Alan’s silhouette in the doorway of the house: “My mindset is that if he attempts to leave that doorway, I won’t be able to react fast enough, we won’t be able to get our hostage rescue plan in place fast enough, before he kills the two people inside.”

It was Wallace’s third shooting on the job—two of them were fatal. And all of the people he shot were unarmed.

APD later came under criticism for not screening Wallace appropriately before he was hired. A DOJ report that found Albuquerque officers had a pattern of unconstitutional use of force mentions this case specifically: “When the officer shot Gomez, the circumstances would not have suggested to a reasonable officer that there was an immediate threat … .” The report also said statements by police describing the night Alan was shot were inconsistent. Gomez’ family sued APD, and the case was settled for $900,000.

Peter Bochert is the coordinator of the state’s Drug Court. It’s a criminal justice track that requires addicts to get into heavily monitored treatment. “National data tells us that about 50 percent of those in jails and prison are clinically addicted,” he said.

But, Bochert added, you have to have a fully functioning behavioral health system for Drug Court to really work. “There are tremendous needs and gaps statewide that our behavioral health system is just unable to address. We have a lack of nurses and substance abuse care in many of our communities.”

Mike Gomez agreed. “There’s nowhere to hardly go in Albuquerque. Alan was 17 when he really started to do the heroin. He was losing weight. I thought he was going to die. He had this little warrant out for his arrest, for failure to appear for some traffic thing.”

Mike hand-delivered his son’s arrest warrant to police to make sure Alan would get picked up. Because when Alan was in jail, he could get help with detoxing.

Bochert said it’s hard to know what could have prevented any one shooting case. “If they’re getting the appropriate services, I think we are forestalling some of the horrific things we’ve seen with these APD shootings,” he said. “By the time they end up out on the street shouting at each other and guns getting drawn, we’ve missed opportunities further up stream.”

Police shootings, Bochert said, are often the tragic conclusion to a series of failures.

You’ve heard of James Boyd, the homeless man who was killed by Albuquerque police last year. But you might not have heard of Len Fuentes. He, too, was mentally ill when he brandished a knife and was shot and killed by APD.

Fuentes’ mom said she had found mental health care for her son, but it was three days too late.

The 911 tape from Monday night, July 16, 2010, has two clear gunshots on it. Next on the tape—and on all the audio officers recorded during the incident—are the harsh, raw cries of Fuentes’ fiancée, Gwendolyn Dalton. It takes a long time for them to calm her down.

Later that night, she’s interviewed by a detective. She thought he’d been Tased, she explained. But then she realized what happened. “I started screaming ‘Did you shoot him? Did you shoot him? Did you shoot him?’ And no one would answer me,” she said. “And I tried to run towards him, and the police grabbed me and put me on the ground and put their knee in my back. I was screaming for Len to look at me because I was on my stomach on the ground. I just wanted him to open his eyes and look at me, because he was moaning.”

He’d carried a steak knife in the waistband of his jeans, which police said he drew and used to threaten them, yelling for the officers to shoot him.

Sylvia Fuentes, Len’s mom, says police killed her son when they didn’t have to. She set up our meeting at the apartments where he died. She walked me through his death.

She said her son loved his parents and was a bright kid. But around the age of 13 or 14, he started changing. He suddenly became introverted, got involved with drugs and attempted suicide. Len would disappear for days at a time, Sylvia said. She tried to put him in a psychiatric hospital, but they didn’t have enough beds.

“And when they had the beds, I didn’t have the boy because he had run off again,” she said. “So it was really hard to get him help.”

Sylvia didn’t know Len was schizophrenic until he was incarcerated in California. Prison is where he was diagnosed, where a lot of people with mental illness are diagnosed.

Len did eight years in Folsom; a former fiancé died after he crashed his motorcycle with her riding on the back. He’d been on parole in Albuquerque for about a year before he was killed.

Sylvia said she was having a hard time getting him plugged into psychiatric services. But things were looking up, she remembered. He was going to move back in with her in a few days.

“And in three days was also going to be his first appointment with a psychiatrist,” she said. “I had been trying to get one for him since he had gotten out of prison, and I never could.”

It eats her up, this idea, that she didn’t get psychiatric health care figured out for Len in time.

About half of the adults with severe mental illness in the United States—3.9 million—are not receiving mental health care, according to The Treatment Advocacy Center.

And the criminal justice system here there’s a shortage of treatment options, says John Madrid. He’s a bail bondsman. “Case in point, I had a bond on Friday. His family wanted him out. I said, ‘I will not bond him out until Monday, when his services kicked in.’ ”

A bondsman’s primary job is to make sure people show up in court. Madrid is not trained to deal with mentally ill people, but he has a lot of experience doing it.

“You know, the family said they would take care of him,” he said. “But it was safer for the situation for me to wait until Monday, so once he’s released the family can take him directly to his inpatient facility that he needed to be at.”

Inmates might see a psychiatrist while they’re in jail or prison, get diagnosed like Len Fuentes and begin receiving care. But then they do their time, and they’re released with a 30-day supply of their medications. Outside, maybe they can’t find regular treatment. And so they come back, again and again, returning to their de facto mental health facility in the back of a squad car. Each pass through the system, there’s a chance for an altercation with police.

“What a lot of evidence shows that if you deal with the mental health issue, you avoid the criminality,” he said. “And of course that better serves the state in terms of how much money they’re putting into the criminal justice system.”

Pepin says the county has committed more than $1 million to creating transitional housing for mentally ill people so they don’t have to go to jail. And Republican Sen. Sander Rue has introduced legislation this session that would find alternatives for mentally ill inmates around the state.

This story is the first in a series about APD shooting deaths and public health. It aired on KUNM 89.9 FM and is part of KUNM’s Public Health New Mexico project.

— Since our launch two years ago, the New Mexico Compass has provided a home for hundreds of thoughtful articles created over thousands of volunteer hours. Co-founder Marisa Demarco and I couldn’t be more proud of what a dedicated crew made out of love for the work and this place we call home.

Our overarching aim for the Compass was to offer an outlet for local news and cultural stories that might not be told otherwise, and to create work that matters to people across the state. Thanks to our talented colleagues and generous partner organizations, that goal was assured from the start.

Other goals were both lofty and resistant to compromise: Figure out how to raise sufficient long-term capital to support a staff with living wages and benefits. Cultivate an organizational culture reflective of our state’s diversity and responsive to dissent and critical dialogue. Train up-and-coming journalists. Safeguard our work from outside influences. Amplify marginalized voices. Improve the transparency and accountability of New Mexico institutions, including within our own industry. Build trust with an audience cynical about news by sticking to journalism ethics. Innovate storytelling and discussion using online tools.

All we wanted was everything. (We still do.) But we also learned that everything was beyond the scope of our resources, especially since we’re like a lot of New Mexicans. Neither of us has money. No one we know well enough to partner with has deep pockets from which to lend or invest in our venture. We also believe life is too short, too beautiful and too interesting not to take a stab at the seemingly impossible.

We’re humbled and inspired by what we learned by our striving, proud that the Compass contributed to substantive local policy changes. We’re thrilled that several of the people we mentored over the years have gone on to find careers in journalism.

We’ve worked with so many smart contributors and benefitted from the support of other veteran journalists—like Carolyn Carlson, our friend to the end. A remarkable board of directors (Laura Marrich, Moira Gerety, James Montalbano) had our backs. Over the last several months, Deputy Director Joe Cardillo went to bat for this outlet, too, and “grateful” doesn’t begin to describe how we regard his expert help. The people and ideas propelling the Compass were all rock-solid.

The APD Files, this year’s major reporting pilot project and our fundraising test case, drew national attention and passionate local supporters. Unfortunately, the final tally of funds fell far short of what we need to complete the APD Files properly. We also concluded that the business models we explored for converting the Compass into a sustainable venture simply aren’t viable right now. Local media—especially hard news—is a tough sell, though everyone agrees it’s essential.

We started this venture without knowing how to run a business. While there’s always more to learn, we shutter the Compass with new skills and a firm sense of how to create a successful venture next time.

It’s been especially painful over the past several weeks to conclude we can’t afford to fulfill the full scope of the APD Files. Our concept for a police records database (an open-access, searchable tool we hoped would help foster accountability and reform around police/community relations) will have to be shelved. We also have to drastically scale back our plans for original reporting around the records. When the more modest series has wrapped up, it’ll be time to move on.

For those of you who donated to our Indiegogo campaign, please expect an email with more details on our amendments to the project.

For those of you who refer to the trove of content on nmcompass.com, we’ll keep the site live for at least the next year.

We’re brimming with fresh ideas and gratification that our idealism was tempered but not compromised by these past two years. Idealism still guides us, as the Compass is one chapter in a longer story my colleagues and I are eager to continue forging in this community we’re so devoted to.

The Compass came up short on cash but full of heart. Thanks to each of you for accompanying us on this adventure.

For reasons my colleagues and I will talk about more in forthcoming blogs, the business side of providing news has been taking up even more space than usual in our minds and conversations these past few weeks. The questions we’re grappling with aren’t new (we’ve been asking variations of them since the Compass‘ hungry infancy), and we share them with countless other journalists and media enterprises. But I’ve been finding it helpful to sift through and revisit some of the literature that’s formed from shifting sands of the news industry.

Tracing back to semi-ancient history (c. 2002) yields this report from the Carnegie Foundation, which includes an (almost quaint) rundown of the ownership structures overarching major newspaper and broadcasting conglomerates of that day. I’ve read this report before, but armed with new insights, new points surfaced. Like this from Jay Rosen (with my emphasis added):

Observers interested in improving…service to the public might want to start at the local level–perhaps by working up a widely publicized awards program for the fifty worst TV news operations in the country. “One of them might be Los Angeles,” he said. “Some of the most sophisticated markets have the worst news, because of the dynamics of competition.“

Then there’s this bit that cuts to the core of many layers of hazard built into any news operation that marries itself to the profit motive underlying big money investment:

“If a public company underperforms for a sustained period of time, it gets taken over. And in the news business, if a company gets taken over, the quality of the journalism inevitably declines.”

By 2010, some of the panic and contentiousness among prominent news-thinkers seems to have subsided. A little. And it’s important to note that the current of optimism running through Carnegie’s report from that year includes a new sense of acceptance that

“It’s too early to know how the audience is going to define high-quality journalism.”

(Note: The Carnegie Foundation has its own complex history of contributing to the dynamics of both market competition and definitions of what constitutes a “public interest.” U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich told the New Yorker, “as in the late nineteenth century, when Carnegie, Rockefeller, and others did so, these [contemporary]philanthropic actions are small potatoes relative to the large and growing problems faced by the poor and lower middle class.”)

An intense focus on audience for business reasons has implications that are also exciting when it comes to re-creating local news in the more honest image of our communities. To me, it represents a long-overdue opportunity to meaningfully place the needs and interests of local people where they belong from both a moral and economic standpoint—that is, above the needs and interests of traditional pursestringers (advertisers and philanthropists). This realignment of priorities also has exciting implications for a new and more perfect union between old-school journalism and new-school business startupism:

“Let’s be clear: All you are selling is access to an audience that trusts us. And if they don’t trust us, you’ve got nothing to sell.”

Your most intimate, personal details are worth big money and a complicated maze of government regulation. It may feel like you’re getting content for free when you click through one of those quick “No/Yes/Maybe/Sometimes” surveys on a news site, but you’re actually feeding information to curious companies. Tech giants are finding increasingly clever ways to mine that info; this opinion piece calls for more transparency surrounding those methods. It also harkens back to the ideological shift I mentioned above:

If it’s inevitable that we’ll share in the money generated by our identities and actions, the savviest organizations are the ones who will clarify this new economy for users. Rather than shift privacy policies to cater to advertisers’ needs, it’s time to go straight to the people generating the data that drives the digital economy.

— I’ve lived in Albuquerque all my life, excepting some infant days in Farmington, N.M., where I was born. Like many of you, I’m a stakeholder.

I know the onset of weariness that comes with bad news in the 505, the tired feeling when we get with one more public black eye as national news outlets leap in to take a look—and then leap right back out.

Remember that author who penned an op-ed about Albuquerque for the NYT connecting the beatings of the homeless men to the APD shootings and painting the city as a pit of despair? My strong, frustrated reaction as a city resident to that piece left me with a lot of questions about what I’m up to as a journalist.

My job is to find and tell the truth. I can’t manufacture a nicer truth. But what does it mean when facts provide fodder for sensationalism? I don’t get to pick what happens to the stories once they’re told. I don’t get to choose who runs with the narrative—or which direction they head.

I’ve spent some afternoons lately with the family members of people who were killed by the Albuquerque Police Department, and there are many more interviews on the horizon with people who’ve spent a lot of time thinking about criminal justice, mental health care, substance abuse and law enforcement. I’ve also been heading Downtown to pick up the audio and video associated with fatal police shootings—like yesterday when the records custodian finally released all of the James Boyd video. It’s part of a project we’re working on here at the Compass. We’re creating a database of what we’ve received through public records requests about the fatal police shootings that includes context, articles, a look at the bigger picture, and back-and-forth with stakeholders.

After speaking with these people who bravely share painful and intimate stories of their family members, I do not want to see those details become part of the “Albuquerque is Scary—You know, Like ‘Breaking Bad’ ” series.

Why do these parents and grandparents bother to meet with me? Why am I pursuing this? Because we want things to get better. Here. In our city.

I believe that armed with information, people in Albuquerque can participate in changes—big and small. When residents are uninformed or ill-informed, when access to information that’s supposed to be publicly available is restricted, power and decision-making authority rests in the hands of a few.

We can’t alter what’s happened. But The Compass can try to uncover as much of it as possible, so we can start to have a real conversation about what’s going on.

Even though I’ve spent just about all of my 33 years here—and the last 12 investigating this place—I’m regularly surprised by things in New Mexico. I can say with confidence that it’s full of smart, inventive people who are great at carving something from nothing, at finding solutions to impossible-looking problems.

Flying far under the radar of most news coverage: Members of West African immigrant communities (many of them refugees who fled horrific, long-term civil war) report living not just with constant fear for friends and family back in their home countries, but also with fear of stigmatization here in the U.S. The heated tone and fear-centric framing (not to mention errors) in reporting about the Ebola crisis can have very real, lived consequences.

Might we also add stigmatization to the many difficulties journalists face reporting on the virus? Michel Du Cille from the Washington Post was asked to cancel a scheduled visit to Syracuse University because he recently worked in Liberia. Du Cille just cleared the three-week incubation period for the virus following a two-week reporting trip. Says Du Cille:

“My initial reaction was, ‘Maybe I can talk to them and walk them through how you catch Ebola.’ But none of that mattered in the end,” he said. “The most disappointing thing is that the students at Syracuse have missed that moment to learn about the Ebola crisis, using someone who has been on the ground and seen it up close. But they chose to pander to hysteria.”

“Essentially, I think you have to walk back what people think they know, in order to share not only what they should but need to know. The problem with this, of course, is that it’s not a snappy and dramatic and click-bait-y as ‘THREE SIMPLE TRUTHS ABOUT EBOLA THAT COULD SAVE YOUR LIFE’ style headlines.”

Biomedical reporter Jason Tetro adds,

“There is no ‘good’ way to cover this outbreak without incorporation of the local media. They are the ones who understand the culture, the people and how the tide has turned (and whether this is unusual – it may not be). As for crisis communication, it needs to be centralized on the ground in affected areas and focus on the people there.”

Deplorable behavior cloaked as ethical crusading

If you’ve followed the Compass for even a little while, you know we think (and write) a lot about journalism ethics. While I’ve never been into video or digital gaming, I was fascinated to read that a rallying cry for journalism ethics was somehow successfully folded into the maelstrom of “Gamergate.” Canadian tech editor Patrick O’Rourke says questions about conflict of interest haunt gaming journalism just as they do every other form:

“… some websites still seem content to act as PR mouthpieces rather than provide any deep analysis or critiques of gaming content. This is also partly because of the nature of covering the video game industry. Publishers and PR representatives are the gate keepers when it comes to securing interviews, early access to games and exclusive stories.

And Mike Williams, a staff writer at USGamer.net writes in an Oct. 13 editorial, “There are certainly issues involving visibility in long-form content, rumor-mongering, aggregation, press events, and corporate partnership agreements.” He adds, however, “the problem I see in many of the demands is a misunderstanding in how journalism works in our industry.”

The problems with the mob that coalesced around Gamergate’s hashtag don’t end there. Deadspin‘s Karl Wagner posits that “what’s made it effective … is that it’s exploited the same basic loophole in the system that generations of social reactionaries have: the press’s genuine and deep-seated belief that you gotta hear both sides.”

And as oft-threatened freelance writer Leigh Alexander points out at the end of her litany of legitimate ethical concerns facing the gaming industry, most of the issues at the center of “Gamergate” aren’t what many in the cybermob make them out to be:

“Not currently ethical concerns: Women’s sex lives, independent game developers’ Patreons, the personal perspectives of game critics, people having contentious or controversial opinions, who knows who in a close-knit industry (as if one could name an industry where people don’t know each other or work together).”

Her close friend has an African-American son who has a mental illness, so she worries about what might happen to him.

Sometimes, he wanders. When that happens, his family waits with breath held, anticipating the phone call for hours or days and hoping it begins with a calm, “Got someone here that wants to talk with you,” rather than the jumble of official language all in a rush indicating he’s in a hospital, a jail or worse.

He is not aggressive and is almost certainly not a threat to himself or anyone else, but they fear that won’t matter, particularly if he runs into a police officer who doesn’t understand his situation and interprets his erratic behavior as threatening. For his family, the oft-repeated “most police are good and would do the right thing” contrasts with the statistical reality that their son’s skin color makes him more likely to be killed by police—and probably his struggle with a mental illness, too.

When they get the call from anyone other than police, they breathe a sigh of relief because they know what could happen and have seen headlines that hint at the anguish other families like theirs go through.

When it comes to officer-involved shootings that end in a fatality, people talk about context all the time, usually as a nod to the painful truth that we can rarely prove direct cause and effect.

Among the things I’ve heard:

Yes, of course it matters that the person shot dead is a young black man, and that does seem to happen a lot. But he shouldn’t have been arguing with the police officer, and if he’d just followed orders it never would have ended that way.

Police don’t seem to get it. We’re not asking them to never shoot anyone . We know there are realities of the job . But we’re asking them to provide concrete information when it happens and to ask tough questions internally about the how and why. And if that can’t happen internally, then it needs to happen with oversight from outside the department.

The public doesn’t understand how hard a police officer’s job is. They don’t get that you can’t shoot to disarm someone and that once lethal force is engaged, it’s hard to go back.

I’ve looked at the use-of-force continuum, and I want to know why police in Albuquerque go so quickly from 0–60 MPH.

Note: Each local police department has their own use-of-force policy, but it is typically guided by federal force continuum models like this one.

As someone who’s been passionate about the news my whole life, I’ve learned to ask good questions. And while it may be a staple of journalism, the skill also has implications for policymakers and the public at large when talking about officer-involved shootings.

Context means going beyond simple “cops are thugs” vs. “cops are heroes who can do no wrong” narratives, and asking questions like:

What should the primary mission of local police be? Is it about being tough on crime? Is it to help build community? Something else?

How often is excessive use of force actually occurring and to whom?

What happens if police who act unethically and illegally aren’t held accountable or those actions questioned? Does that reinforce the behavior? (Even the former police officers say yes, it probably does.)

But context is not just something talked about. It is something lived.

These things don’t exist in isolation.

To respond to this:

Yes, of course it matters that the person shot dead is a young black man, and that does seem to happen a lot. But he shouldn’t have been arguing with the police officer, and if he’d just followed orders it never would have ended that way.

It’s worth noting that the New Mexico Compass is a nonprofit journalism startup. We don’t have a side and don’t plan to pick any, and the fact that even reporters are asking this question says something about the environment here.

But that’s part of what makes this project so interesting and necessary: Police, policymakers and the public can’t offer solutions unless we are all committed to asking the right questions.

Are the mentally ill disproportionately affected by fatal police shootings in Albuquerque? A lot of people think so (and we suspect this is the case), but no one really knows.

How many fatal or non-fatal shootings are there? Since the most reliable means of tracking this right now is to scan newspaper headlines, no one really knows.

How often are officers using non or less-lethal force compared to lethal force? Has that number increased over the years?

Of course we can’t answer all of these yet. It’s simply too much for one small, not-yet-funded journalism startup to tackle.

But many of the critical stories and much of data exist, and we believe putting them together will help all stakeholders—law enforcement, policymakers, journalists, citizens—ask further questions and figure out what comes next.

If you, too, believe that opening up the gates and providing context matters, I hope you’ll take a moment to support our crowdfunding campaign for the database sometime between now and 11:59 pm PST on Wednesday night.

What separates the Compass project from most is its plan for the money: creating a database of records it has gathered, rather than gathering the records in the first place. To reach that goal through Indiegogo, it will need a surge soon—the month-long campaign, which ends Oct. 15, is less than 10 percent of the way toward its target of $9,375. The Compass will receive all funds raised even if the campaign doesn’t reach its target, and the lion’s share will be used to hire a database developer.

A related piece in the CJR series recently looked into complexities surfacing in Colorado where public records of police work, particularly body cam footage, became the focus of accountability measures:

Widespread use of the cameras is a relatively new phenomenon, and there don’t appear to be any disputes yet over access to the footage. But the varying policies being announced around the state are a reminder of something transparency advocates and media watchdogs have often complained about: Law enforcement officials here have broad discretion to withhold information that in other states might be public, and the courts take a deferential attitude to decisions made by local departments.

Discussions regarding the public interest tied to transparency in public security measures extend to other national/international policy realms. A former CIA operative guest-blogged last week at the Freedom of the Press Foundation (a nonprofit “dedicated to helping support and defend public-interest journalism focused on exposing mismanagement, corruption, and law-breaking in government”) in support of a federal judge’s order requiring that recordings of prisoner force-feedings at Guantanamo be released.

It might not be a bad idea to ask whether a policy we can only be comfortable with by keeping it secret and obscuring it with strained euphemisms is such a great idea.

Among other items we’re combing through:

In an era of an increasingly atomized sense of journalistic authority, what are the pros and cons to the flowering success and ubiquity of first-person narratives?

Editors at a high school newspaper in Langhorne, PA, were recognized by the ACLU for banning use of their school mascot’s racist nickname and maintaining that ban in the face of pressure from school board members.

We’re not alone in our quest to meaningfully grapple with the tough questions the world of news media is up against these days, as evidenced by this mini-film Amy Zerba at the New York Times produced for News Engagement Day on Oct. 7.

“It matters that those who lead the newsroom understand every facet of the community they cover. It matters that the interests and concerns of nonwhite residents need not well up in violence before they are recognized as worthy of attention. It matters that the positive contributions of the nonwhite community be recognized in other than the nonwhite press. It matters that the rich and varied texture of the American voice be heard, and it matters that the picture of America we see on the news and on the front page include pictures of nonwhite people in all stations of life, not just those who are on welfare or in police custody.”

Thankfully, more journalists and media organizations are discussing and confronting the issue. As the Compass is committed to building as much organizational transparency into our startup as we can legally and logistically manage, ongoing examinations of how to create and maintain diversity are paramount. This “game plan” by Lam Thuy Vo is one I’ll be dissecting with my colleagues, and I’m cheered by the advent of the Journalism Diversity Project. (Please note: Additional resources on the topic are always welcome and likely to be shared via Radius.)

Just today, GLADD and the Human Rights Campaign called out the media for too often “inaccurately representing the current climate of acceptance across faith communities,” while simultaneously directing journalists to a reporting guide that “seeks to correct these disparities in reporting,” particularly as midterm election races heat up. The guide includes an extensive resource directory and “new approaches to faith interviews.”

Reporter/editor/producer Carla Murphy also lays out a challenge to consider how other structural forces (such as the consolidation of media ownership or FCC mandates) “[taint] the ground rules for national media policy discussion and debate.”

While we’re on the subject of the FCC and media control, Timothy Karr (a former journalist and current strategist for the non-partisan advocacy group Free Press) wrote an impassioned critique of the ongoing PR campaign waged by phone and cable companies against net neutrality protections. Karr accuses industry giants of using rhetorical sleights-of-hand to mischaracterize what’s at stake as the wait for the FCC’s final decision ticks down. Writes Karr:

“For years now, phone and cable companies have likened the Internet to their private property, a domain over which they have ultimate say.

Under this scenario, Net Neutrality violates the phone and cable companies’ rights as “individuals”—none being more sacred than the right to free speech (or, in their view, the right to throw all other speakers off the front porch).

What’s lost in this spin is this: The Internet is not the private property of AT&T, Comcast and Verizon. It’s a network of networks (some private and some public) that depends on a common set of rules to transport information, connect people and function. And the most important rule for preserving free speech online is common carriage, the classification that prohibits ISPs from interfering with content.”

It was disappointing but not surprising to learn this week that the rapidly expanded Vice News, “an international news organization created by and for a connected generation,” appears not to have taken the time to consider ethical implications of offering seemingly hard news while also operating under the umbrella of the larger Vice Media enterprise. Vice Media, in the company’s own words, is an innovator by virtue of its “360-degree approach [which]ensures that we not only create the content, but that we also distribute, promote, and sell it via our network of advertorial sites.”

Emphasis on advertorial? Capital reports that a Vice staffer who was recently sacked (so, yes, he may have an ax to grind) “went public with a series of accusations against his former employer, backed up by screenshots of emails he posted this week to Twitter, suggesting that the company had killed articles he’d written because of potential conflicts with advertisers and ‘brand partners’ of the company.”

“No media outlet — no matter how cutting-edge its coverage may be — is truly independent as long as a sponsor is helping to pay its bills.”

Intrusions on the barrier meant to isolate news from the revenue side of media organizations have a long and storied history. But during a time when public trust in the media is still deplorably low, I’d argue that history should be both notorious and cautionary. Furthermore, PR Newser’s point might be accurate if there were no longer any media outlets committed to maintaining a strict firewall between donors/advertisers and journalists. There are still some around, and I’m proud to point out that the Compass is one of them.